Becoming a Better Leader

Mike Hambright (00:00.967)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with Eric Brewer and we’re gonna be talking about becoming a better leader. Basically what kind of got you to this level is not gonna get you to the next level. Eric’s gonna share some of the lessons that he teaches and some of the lessons that he’s learned along the way. So Eric, good to see you buddy.

Eric Brewer (00:17.09)
Good see you, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Hambright (00:19.015)
Yeah, yeah. if you don’t mind, before we get started, obviously you’re a pretty well-known guy, but for those that maybe don’t know you, maybe share a little bit about your background and how you got to this point.

Eric Brewer (00:29.194)
Sure. I’ll actually start with today. We operate in really three markets. One is just basically all of Pennsylvania. So we touch each of the four sections from as far north, as far south, as far east and west as you can go. So from Pittsburgh to Philly, from the Baltimore line all the way up to the New York line, all of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Some of our stuff at Eastern PA runs over into Jersey. So we do some deals and

in southern Jersey. We have just over 45 employees. 90 % of those are in office, in person. We have a handful of virtual assistants and some folks in our lead management, marketing, human resources that work virtually. We’ll do just over 400 transactions this year, a little mix of wholesale, wholesale, rentals, and we do about 100 of those are fix and flips. I started in 2006.

I had a business partner in 2006. We worked together for about seven years. I bought out his shares of the company. So I’ve been operating by myself as the owner since, I guess it was 2014, 2015. So just shy about 10 years. And super excited today. We have again, just over 40 employees, five full-time executive level leaders. So I get to function today.

More like a CEO or an owner than I ever have. My schedule is amazing. I’m not working 70 hours a week anymore. I sort of get to do what I love to do in the parts of the business that really give me fulfillment. And I’ve learned an awful lot of lessons along the way. And just happy to share maybe some of those lessons or stories with you and your audience today.

Mike Hambright (02:18.375)
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, I think, you know, I’ve kind of felt it too, right? Early on, you’re the, well, maybe not necessarily always young, but the young hustler, like you’re hustling. And we kind of say that’s a season, right? You got to grow out of that. And you’re willing to do whatever it takes to kind of get the business off the ground. And as you start to add a team, especially as large as you have, you start to add more complexities with more markets and stuff like that. You clearly can’t do it all yourself. And so I know we’re going to kind of talk about that journey today.

What do you want to kind of talk about like phases of the business, like where people are at and then like the leadership, I guess, skills you need at each level?

Eric Brewer (02:57.192)
Yeah, it’s tough. A of times when I talk about this, I’ve been through each of those phases, but I feel like we have a little bit of tunnel vision as we’re going through them. So it’s hard to, it’s hard to imagine what’s ahead. And I think maybe through like PTSD or something, we try and block out what we left behind. But yeah, I think when I, when I first started, there was like these feelings of like rage where I wanted to get away from my W2 and I had some

Mike Hambright (03:13.449)
What’s behind?

Eric Brewer (03:24.713)
some great experiences. I spent time in the military and then the automobile industry. I was a salesman. Worked my way up through management. It was just burned out of that. It got really, really hard with the development of the internet and stuff. Holding gross profit on cars got really difficult around the late 90s, early 2000s. Talk about being young. So if I was selling cars in the late 90s, there’s enough evidence to…

to know that I’m no longer young. But yeah, I was just kind of burned out of that. I was ready for a change, made my way into real estate. And I think I was, when I started as an entrepreneur, I was more like running from something than I was towards something. And the thing that I was running away from was having my schedule dictated, being capped on my income, really being controlled by, let’s say corporate. I worked for a Toyota franchise that was family owned, but.

Mike Hambright (03:56.431)
Hahaha

Eric Brewer (04:23.72)
Just a lot of restrictions on what you could and couldn’t do and what you had to wear. And I’ve always been a bit of a rebel and I’d sort of outgrown that. So I was just, I was just so ready to get away from what I was doing. That feeling of like, Hey, I got to get away from this with like the newness of being in real estate. went from about an eight to 10 year career in sales and the car business to real estate. So.

I mean, I had good sales experience, which certainly was gonna help me and was super valuable as I got started in real estate, but I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything about ARVs and MAOs and contractors and real estate contracts. So there was like some nervousness and excitement. So I think the early phase of business for me, as I can remember, was like working so feverishly to get away from what I had known as a of a corporate career background.

early in my life and this enthusiasm and excitement and a little bit of fear sprinkled in about what was new. And, you know, that lasted for a couple of years until I got a deal, a couple of deals under my belt. had some success, enough success that we were out of capacity. I couldn’t get to every rehab project. I couldn’t walk every new opportunity. So we started hiring some people. So I went from having to be a solarpreneur that

knows how to negotiate real estate deals and get in and out of contracts and hire a contractor, fire a contractor, estimate a renovation, negotiate an offer on a deal when we sell it to now actually have to hire people that can do that stuff and train them and support them and manage them. So think the second layer of business that I recall was trying to get some leverage.

You know, trying to create systems that the business wasn’t capped by my individual capacity. We can only do 10 deals a month early on because that’s the only one. That’s it. I could only walk so many houses a day. When we first started in 2006, I bought almost everything off the MLS. So, but I would have to walk and make offers on 15 properties to get one.

Eric Brewer (06:43.161)
So to buy 10, you can do the math, right? You walk a lot of houses to get 10 offers accepted. And then I’d have to walk the property and hire a contractor and build a scope. And then I got to go back to those twice a week to make sure nobody was stealing from me or doing a bad job. So phase two, I had to learn how to become a manager and a good interviewer and a good hire and how to hold people accountable.

And that was a mess. It was almost like learning how to sell all over again, right? You make all of these mistakes and it backfires. And I hired some really good people and didn’t do a good job of managing them and leading them. And I lost them. And I hired some bad people. And that ended. you know, whether I hired someone good and I messed it up because I was a crappy manager or I hired someone bad, I still was a crappy manager. either one of those situations, no matter who I hired, it generally ended poorly.

And that phase is just like learning a whole new business again, because now it’s the business of trying to hire and manage people. And then beyond that, you kind of figure that out, right? You get a little bit better at that, and you hire a little bit better people. And you have a little bit better process, and you start to experience what feels like scale. And I’m working 40 hours a week, and now we’re doing 300 deals a year. And then we broke that. What I found was,

I got a little bit better at managing, but I was horrible at leadership. I think those two sometimes get intermingled on there. Very much not the same thing. Managers manage things, leaders lead people. And I got good at managing, but now I had turnover again. Instead of once every year losing people, I was losing them every three and a half to five years, which actually was harder because after three and a half to five years,

There’s more of a relationship with that person. You’ve come to count on them for more things. Maybe they do things and know how to do things that no one else in the organization knows how to do because they’ve been doing it for so long. And then some of our customers or vendors or contracts, contractors have loyalty to that person. So now when I lost a five year employee, they would take some extra stuff with them, not just, you know, Hey, I got to replace that seat. So

Mike Hambright (08:41.352)
right.

Eric Brewer (09:02.177)
The fourth phase for me was like, man, I gotta stop managing and start leading.

And then I think like.

Mike Hambright (09:09.811)
Talk a little bit more about what that means to you, like being more of a leader than a manager.

Eric Brewer (09:16.618)
Yeah, I think management and I think you and I will talk about this a little bit because you asked me what I’m passionate about right now and that’ll ooze out of me here shortly. But I think at the management level, it feels cold and sterile and mechanical. There’s like this one for one trade off where it’s like, hey, we pay you to do a job. The job requires this. You give me that. I’ll give you a paycheck. Don’t ask me to hang out after work. I don’t care about your kids.

Maybe I’ll ask, but I don’t really care just enough to get you to do a little bit of extra work. It’s a very mechanical, very sterile, very, it lacks depth and meaning. Like if you ever take, when someone just says, that’s my manager, but generally doesn’t come across very warm. No one ever really describes a manager as someone that they have a meaningful relationship with. If someone were ever to describe someone and say something like, well, that was my coach.

or that person was a leader of mine, or if someone calls you a mentor, they’ve adopted a different opinion about you. I feel like you’ve had a different impact. So I think like management is very surface level task oriented. Leadership is like, hey, this person has taken my life in a direction that is better than it was before. And I have a feeling of gratitude towards them.

I know that’s a little bit of a squishy description, but I think management is sort of, it’s very much needed by the way. think every organization needs a balance of both. You have to manage things and lead people. And I think the stark differences is that management is very task level. Leadership is, Hey, I have an influence over you that goes beyond whether or not you do the work that you’re hired for. That person looks up to you. They will often seek.

maybe counsel from a leader about how to manage their personal life or their finances, or they come across a difficult phase of life or managing a personal relationship and they’ll say, hey, Mike, I know this is not work related, but would you mind helping me with this? So I think that’s the difference between management and leadership is management typically operates inside of the confines of the job and the roles and responsibilities and leadership.

Eric Brewer (11:35.57)
takes on this different meaning, this different layer of impact that goes beyond the office wall.

Mike Hambright (11:41.821)
Yeah, management really just cares about the results. Not necessarily the people, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. And how do you develop? I mean, it’s hard, like, you know, when you start to get gray hair like us, you get a little bit of wisdom. You got some arrow wounds in your back. You’ve done some things, right? You kind of learn the, you know, I would say that most of my lessons learned have tended to be the hard way.

Eric Brewer (11:46.492)
Yeah, pretty much.

Eric Brewer (11:56.338)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (12:06.771)
And I’m sure you’ve got some hard way lessons as well like if you had it to do over again like to get to that to get to that point to where you become a better leader and it’s a constant it’s it’s like a it’s it’s not it’s like it’s there’s not a destination right it’s like you’re evolving it’s a it’s the journey not the destination I guess right, but what are some lessons learned? Along the way for people that are listening to this that are kind of earlier on in their career maybe that want to Make that a smoother path than hard lessons learned

Eric Brewer (12:09.724)
Yeah.

Eric Brewer (12:23.527)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (12:39.507)
I guess what are some key things you’ve done from a development standpoint?

Eric Brewer (12:41.085)
Yeah, let me let me break it down into two. I don’t think there is an easy way. I think I was probably given great advice at the age of 28 and 30 and 32 and 34, and it was exactly the right advice. But I knew better. All right, maybe I didn’t want to hear it. Maybe I thought it was a great idea, but I didn’t want to slow down enough to do that.

Mike Hambright (13:05.234)
You

Eric Brewer (13:11.77)
Right?

I don’t think there, I think I can give them whatever advice I’ve learned along the way and you’ve learned along the way. And I think the only lessons I’ve ever really learned came with an arrow in the back. It came with significant loss. came with, I think that’s the way, you know, for me, part of my leadership journey has really included a significant pivot towards my faith.

And it’s amazing that literally every leadership book I read, whatever that principle is that I walk away from, whether it’s Patrick Lencioni or Liz Wiseman or John Maxwell, I’ll often read something in a book. I was reading something this morning in a parenting book and there was some wisdom in there and I highlighted it and I circled it.

And I’m certain that I’ll be in church on Sunday and something from the main stage that the pastor says will directly correlate to that. So the one thing I’ve learned about leadership is one of the best leadership book that was ever written is the Bible. I’ve found so much wisdom in the Bible directly correlated to leadership. But some of the things, so I think that the number one fundamental is

It will almost inevitably have to hurt and be painful in order for it to stick. So I think the words of encouragement I would give to someone that may not be at that level yet is embrace it. There will be situations where you’ll have turnover, maybe a partnership ends, maybe you go through a difficult financial season in the business where your back’s against the wall. I’ve been through those.

Eric Brewer (14:59.042)
Mind you, I started in 2006. Shortly after I started 2008, the world melted down. I learned a ton of leadership stuff, right? Probably more what not to do then, than to do. However, I think that the best advice I could give to someone is to embrace the losses and be, be sure to, the one thing I wish I would have done differently is taken more responsibility and ownership of those. I was very much a finger pointer.

Mike Hambright (15:10.524)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (15:26.483)
That was very much the thing.

Eric Brewer (15:29.015)
back then where, well, it’s the market or that person was a bad hire. That person didn’t do what they were supposed to, or they’re not doing the sales training. And over time, what I started to do was reflect and say, how could I have managed that situation differently? So that that person I hired was more successful or that person literally had it this morning. I was so upset with a leasing agent that we had. There was like seven things that I wanted done.

that weren’t done and I wanted them done in three days and now it’s 13 days later and they’re still not done. So I was all ramped up to come into this morning and I was like 75 % sure I was just going to fire him. Like walk in and go, we’re done. Instead I reflected and I thought and I said, how clear were my expectations? Is there a hundred percent certainty that I communicated to this person that I want it done in three days or is that just what I expected but not communicated? So

Mike Hambright (16:23.207)
Hmm.

Eric Brewer (16:25.815)
I the answer was is I’m not sure that I made it crystal clear That I wanted that done in three days. I’m not even sure I definitely said it and There’s certainly not an email to prove it. You know what I could be out of line So I came in and said hey, what’s going on with these three things? Turns out I did communicate it, but I didn’t communicate a deadline or an urgency So it was on her list of things to do, but it wasn’t at the top so I’ve

I’ve gotten better at taking the blame for everything and the credit for nothing. It’s a very humble place to operate, but it’ll keep you in this constant. You had said it’s, it’s not a destination. It’ll, there is constantly feedback that you can use to build off of and reflect and find areas of improvement. So I think that’s been the number one core fundamental thing because it is a constant evolution. get to level four of leadership.

Mike Hambright (17:13.767)
Yeah.

Eric Brewer (17:25.184)
There’s another, you can always go higher. You can always get better. You can always get more influential, but I would say the cause of a good leader is their ability to reflect and take ownership of everything that happens around them. Not just the good stuff, everything. We have control over more than what I think sometimes we give ourselves credit for.

Mike Hambright (17:43.016)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (17:47.609)
for sure. And any any advice? mean, there’s a lot of folks that are probably listening to this that that are working hard, still working hard, still working a lot of hours, still hustling, right? And so how do you do you have to carve out time to spend to reflect? Do you have to you have to kind of be more principled with how you spend your time, right? So to have that time to reflect and so any kind of words of wisdom there to share?

Eric Brewer (18:00.554)
Yeah.

Eric Brewer (18:10.517)
The book Miracle Morning was a fundamental pivot for me. And what he talks about is like the impact that a intentional morning routine can have. And there’s six things in there. He calls them savers. It’s an acronym. It’s S’s for silence. That could be meditation or prayer or a little bit of both.

A is affirmations, intentional affirmations that speak into existence the way that you want to show up each day. Visualization. I literally today, I went through my schedule and I closed my eyes and I visualized how each one of my appointments and my meetings would go today. E is exercise, as little as five minutes of body movement every single morning before you start your day. Talks a lot about the psychological and scientific things that change in your body when you get up first thing in the morning and you move around.

And then S is scribing, journaling. I carry a journal with me every day. I start with gratitude and I list out my priorities for the day. So you can do that as little as 15 minutes. Ideally, it’s an hour. So there’s six of those things and you dedicate 10 minutes, but you can do it as little as six minutes. You literally dedicate 60 seconds to each of those things. And I mean, if you read for, let’s say five minutes a day and you made it,

business books, personal development, mindset. I’m reading a really good book right now called 10 % Happier. It’s about the power of meditation, how it reduces anxiety and worry and all of that stuff. So I think a morning routine that includes some type of personal development with reading carved out, everybody’s got 10 minutes in a day. It’s a lie we tell ourselves and I did for a very long time that I was too busy. So carving out at a minimum start with 15 minutes and do each of those things or some of those things.

But dedicating, you know, to figure what’s 15 minutes a day, seven days a week, that’s a hundred and some minutes, an hour and a half. The average book probably takes five hours to read. So that means every three weeks you finish a book. That means 17 times, 18 times a year you finished a book. So in one year, if you read 18 leadership books,

Eric Brewer (20:26.757)
Unless you’re about as bullheaded as I was when I was 19, you should be a little bit better leader. You should be a little bit better salesman. You could be a little bit better manager. You could be a little bit better operator. You could be a little bit better COO. That’s the best I’ve carved out 30 minutes. Get up, start today. Get up 30 minutes earlier than you do any other day. Do those six things for five minutes each and watch the compound effect that it has over time. My son’s so proud of them.

I’m gonna give him a shout out here. He’s a college basketball player. He’s on a full scholarship. He plays division two. He’s got an amazing leader as a coach and he pounds into their head every day. Little things equal big things. So those little things, six of those, it gives me goosebumps talking about six things, literally 30 minutes, right? Just everybody can get up 30 minutes. If you go, I’m not a morning person, go to bed 30 minutes earlier, you’ll get the same amount of sleep. Everybody can go to bed 30 minutes early. Put your phone away, turn the TV off, go to bed.

You do those things, they compound over time, and as little as a month, you’ll see massive positive benefits.

Mike Hambright (21:35.441)
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, in my experience for real estate investors and really any other entrepreneurs I know, they generally don’t do things like dramatically better than the next person. Like they just do a bunch of things a little bit better. Like that fringe, those little bitty things can have a huge difference in your performance and your profitability ultimately,

Eric Brewer (21:55.961)
Yeah, and consistency, like doing those little things over an extended period of time. It’s kind of like, I saw a YouTube video the first time someone introduced that to me. was like this little hammer and it had like this little tiny like ball peen on it and just tapped. And then it showed like a, you know, a time-lapse video. And after like barely any pressure, but after like six months, there was this massive hole in this big rock because the hammer had such concentrated focus.

Mike Hambright (22:24.147)
Yeah.

Eric Brewer (22:24.267)
energy going into one little spot, it seemed like an insurmountable task, but just that little bit of pressure consistently every day, every week, every month, every morning, makes a really big difference over time. So yeah, you’re true. It’s never what’s the saying that’s the really successful people do the boring stuff longer and more consistently than everybody else. It’s very seldom is it like this profound discovery or invention that they came across.

Mike Hambright (22:44.755)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (22:50.747)
Right, right, yeah.

Eric Brewer (22:51.183)
There’s some tried and true habits of successful people and they just stuck with them longer.

Mike Hambright (22:56.787)
So one of the things that you talked about before we started recording was just how you’re now really coaching your team and you’re kind of EOSing their life, if you will. You’re like basically kind of goal planning and success planning and stuff for them individually. And that very much sounds like a leader, but just talk about like what you’re doing there. And then maybe, you know, inside of that, share some lessons that other folks can learn from.

Eric Brewer (23:04.973)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Brewer (23:20.61)
Yeah, it’s funny. if you I wouldn’t invite you if you ever go look at like, the people that you know, whether they work with you or for you or alongside of you, or they’re your neighbor and you look at like the people that experience true success in their life. We found I read an amazing book called The Power of One More by Ed Mylett. And shortly after I read this book called Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly. And it was the combination, those two things like ran into each other like a

a car wreck in the middle of the interstate. And what I thought was is like, we put so much pressure on people to perform at work. And oftentimes as managers, we disregard the fact that they have all this other stuff in their life that they have to worry about. They have their personal relationships, they have their personal finances, they have their, what I call being or spirituality, I think, is the relationship they have with themselves.

Like a lot of times we don’t pause long enough to reflect and say, what is the relationship? What is my internal voice saying? Right? And then, you know, also their body, right? Like, what does their physical appearance look like? If you look at like the top business people in the world, they’re almost always in shape, right? It’s almost like the better physically they are, somehow there’s this tendency for them to be able to work harder and longer and more sustained, right? Like effort. So.

We and then my let’s book talks about that. calls it the core for so I married those two together and something I do now with all of our people is we invest in their personal life in four areas. We have conversations about their physical strength, whether or not they can run a mile or five miles or hike 100 and we set we help them set goals. It’s a little dicey at first when you sit down with people and I have some coaching clients that I hope with leadership.

And I make these suggestions, I don’t want to talk about that stuff with him. I don’t want to talk about that stuff with her. That feels sensitive. But yet I’ve seen a direct correlation. I’ve lost about 60 pounds in the last two years. My ability, my cognitive ability, my clarity of thought, my decision-making, my energy, my mood, everything that contributes to better performance at work.

Eric Brewer (25:43.307)
Instantly changed when I got in better shape and started exercising eating cleaner. So I said to myself I said man That’d be a great gift to give to somebody encouragement support and accountability because all of us in some capacity struggle a little bit With maybe our physical appearance or the way that we feel or we want to be stronger Maybe want to be thinner. We want to look better in a suit. We want to look better in a bathing suit, right?

mean, my wife, she’s an amazing shape, but every day she stresses about whether or not she can lose those final three pounds. And I said, what, what, man, how great would it be if I could give that to people, that support and encouragement? And then what happened if their performance got better? Man, it would be a great trade-off where we pour into them and develop to them and give them the support. They, often don’t get anywhere else. And what if that paid off where they did a better job? So we started doing that about two years ago.

So we’ve done, we do retirement planning for all of our people. have people come in, CPAs, financial planners, they come in and they do workshops. We sit down and we develop a passive income retirement goal for all of our people. So where we break it down to how much money per hour they need to earn, invest and save to accomplish their passive income goal by their retirement age. We set body and physical goals for them. They want to be able to run a 5K. I have someone that wants to

Over the next 10 years, will be 10 years older, but he wants his internal age to go backwards 10 years. So he’ll be 60. He wants to be 40. Blood panels, tests like that, visceral, all of that stuff. And then their being, a relationship that they have, their emotional awareness, their relationship with themselves. And then we actually set goals for them and balance their key relationships with their spouse or significant other, their children, if they have some.

Mike Hambright (27:20.817)
Wow.

Eric Brewer (27:36.604)
and then how much time they spend with their friends. And we set literally, we started tenure goals, we go to three, we go to one, and then we set 90 day start and stops for all of them. And our culture, which I thought was pretty good before we started doing that, it is magnetic right now. Our results, we get the same contracts and profitability with a 30 % lower marketing budget.

We get more work with less people. I remember I had to add all these admin people to support salespeople to all this stuff. We’ve become more efficient. We go to the gym as a group. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we have a company funded personal trainer. We rent out like this 15,000 square foot area of turf at a local gym. And we have a personal trainer that takes, get anywhere from eight to 12 people that show up 630 every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And we train together. We go to war together. We push our bodies together.

We encourage each other and that’s amazing how it carries over into the workplace. You see everybody walking around like carrying these big water bottles. We try and stay hydrated. So we’re an emotionally, spiritually, physically healthy group of people, at least trying to get a little bit better. Some of us are further along than others. I’m like the middle of the back of the pack. I’m still trying to lose a couple pounds and eat good and stay away from birthday cake.

That’s my primary focus now as a CEO. I don’t often spend too much time digging into individual properties or renovation budgets or negotiations. I am really trying to improve the quality of the life of the people that work here and letting everything else sort itself out.

Mike Hambright (29:17.661)
Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Good stuff. Well, Eric, thanks for sharing your lessons of leadership with us today.

Eric Brewer (29:23.91)
Thanks for asking, I love talking about it.

Mike Hambright (29:25.905)
Yeah, yeah. So if folks want to connect with you or learn more about what you’ve got going on, where can they go?

Eric Brewer (29:31.077)
I think the best place to keep up with me is I’m pretty active on social media. I’m on Facebook, I’m on Instagram, and I’m on TikTok. Yeah, so you can look me up on any of those social media handles. We also do some coaching. I help people develop as a leader. We have some sales operations training as well. All that information’s on my social media.

Mike Hambright (29:49.585)
Okay, awesome, we’ll add links down below for those that want to check it out and learn more. So thanks again for sharing some lessons with us today. Yeah, everybody, hope you got some good value from today. There’s this idea of the law of the lid, right? You’re not gonna basically be able to develop your business beyond your own leadership skills, and that’s what Eric was talking about today. You have to continue to become a better and better and better leader so your team can kind of rise up behind you as well, so lift you up as well. So hope you got some good value from today’s show. We’ll see you on the next one.

Eric Brewer (29:56.805)
I appreciate it, Mike.